Hittin Curves/Riding High

In spite of all my lofty plans for Sunday, I ended up spending most of the day reading Harry Potter in the grass and sun of Central Park. It was wonderful.

Today was wonderful in a completely different way, as I woke up at 5:30 a.m. to ride along with one of the City Harvest truck drivers on his delivery routes. I arrived at the Food Rescue Facility in Queens at 7 a.m. and waited in the lounge (moderately awkwardly) with the drivers until my assigned host for the day was ready. Eddie turned out to be one of my favorite people I've met this summer: extraordinarily friendly, impressively loquacious and highly opinionated. I came home bursting with knowledge about his personal life and wisdom for life in general.

at the FRF -- 7 a.m.

felt too awkward to ask him for a pic together at first, and forgot later on

and we're off!

Eddie says women these days go after married men instead of single ones because married men are less likely to have AIDS. It's a thing, apparently. Eddie has lots of opinions about relationships. He told me about how he calls his wife (of 33 years) his girlfriend because they date to keep the love alive. He buys her two dozen roses every other week and calls her every morning to wake her up.

Eddie also says that being nice to people will get you far in life, as will careful record-keeping and personal organization skills. He told me about how you sometimes have to demand respect from other people, and to never put up with someone treating you wrong. Eddie loves his job because it's fun and fulfilling. His grandkids think he's a hero because he feeds millions of people every day.

Eddie and I drove all around Manhattan, picking up food from grocery stores and restaurants and dropping it off at churches and other collection centers. All the while I learned all about his personal preferences (loves driving, top 40 radio played loudly, prank calls, sleeping in), dislikes (heights, rats, running, rap, sass), routines (what time he wakes up, when and where he eats, what he does on weekends) and plans (including moving to Florida to get a driving job for a similar nonprofit in Orlando after his youngest daughter moves out of his home in New York).

It was an extremely informative, engaging and entertaining day — especially because I felt entitled to two lunches: one at 10:30 a.m. (five hours after breakfast) and another at 2 p.m.

waiting for bags of bread to be handed up from this bakery's underground storage room

Museums, Movies and Markets

I didn't have work on Friday, so I piddled around a lot, running errands and working from my computer throughout the morning and early afternoon. MoMA was free starting at 4 p.m., so I went there and thoroughly enjoyed the special exhibits (the permanent ones were too crowded for me to even try). Among my favorite displays were a continuous video of a digital clock being painted by an artist in real time (he gradually transformed each digital number of the clock to match the actual time) and something called lightweeds, which were digital plants projected onto the wall in the form of light. They were cool because they responded to the outside natural world through sensors placed on the outside walls of the museum that measured inputs like sunlight, rainfall and wind. I thought both of those were very creative crossovers between the digital and physical worlds.

I met Ellie outside her office at 6 p.m. and we shared a delicious Thai dinner in Brooklyn before sitting down for an outdoor Sundance short films screening. The event started with live music by a cool band called Salt Cathedral, and then we watched a series of six or so selected short films from the most recent Sundance Film Festival. The event was sponsored by an organization called Rooftop Films, which shows "underground" movies outdoors in different locations throughout the city all summer long. I will definitely be going to more of them.

Rooftop Films: Underground Movies Outdoors

Saturday felt very New York in the loveliest of ways. In the morning I attended a City Harvest Mobile Market, a weekly event where City Harvest volunteers distribute produce in various locations around the five boroughs of New York. I went to one in Astoria, Queens and spent three hours bagging hundreds (thousands?) of onions for the long line of people filing through to pick up the food. Volunteers at other tables handed out watermelon, potatoes and carrots. I think I heard someone say most Mobile Markets feed close to 400 people a week — and there are 24 to 31 Mobile Markets in each borough every two weeks: in total distributing millions of pounds of food each week.

I came home feeling lucky for the food in my fridge and for my ability to immediately go out and buy more. I found a farmers market near my apartment and bought lots of organic, locally grown products mostly just out of plain excitement for it being there. The boy from whom I bought sun-dried tomatoes told me I looked like I worked there — totally made my day.

Later I walked to Central Park with a book, a blanket and my camera in my backpack, but before I settled down Ellie called to invite me to the Metropolitan Museum with her and a visiting friend. So I joined them, absorbed some fine art for a couple hours, then ate pizza with them in SoHo before returning to the park for some wonderfully pleasant reading time. (I'm still trying to finish my Spanish Harry Potter book, by the way — a goal for the week.) We spent the evening drinking wine and talking in our apartment. Lots of good conversation about things like sensitivity to potentially offensive terminology from an equality standpoint, and the question of determining what is fine art. If there's one good thing about Duke students it's their unhesitation in diving into an intellectual discussion.

Outside the Met: tourists or trend-setters?

A Visit to the Bronx

After a lengthy meeting about community outreach strategies yesterday morning, the other interns and I spent a couple of hours in the office organizing paperwork and following up with some of the community partners we had met the day before.

After lunch, I took the subway with another of the interns, Jillian, to watch a tour being led at a grocery store in the Bronx. I see racial divides all the time in the South, but it still surprises me to see a huge city like NYC so segregated. I kind of already knew that, since I know poverty lines generally follow racial divides, but still it shocks me to see it in person. I absolutely loathe feeling like the only white person in a low-income neighborhood — not because I'm worried about my safety, but because it makes me shudder to think that my skin color is such a huge factor in my personal success.

The other day I read an immensely intriguing New York Times article about bridging the divide between poor/minority and rich/white college students, because it's absolutely unjust that the rich/white kids are so much more successful in college. I loved reading that the University of Texas at Austin, where my sister Janie will start her first year this fall, has an innovative program to help shrink that gap. Here's the article for anyone interested.

Anyway, the tour in the Bronx was interesting, and I learned a lot from seeing it happen in person. For example, at the end of the tour the participants are asked to spend a few minutes collecting $10 worth of healthy food items based on what they learned on the tour — which City Harvest then pays for. When one man brought back two boxes of butter popcorn in his shopping bag, I was impressed by the delicacy and tact the tour leaders used to tell him why they couldn't buy that for him. The women who led the tour seemed like really cool people in general, so I'm hopeful I'll see them around the office or at other City Harvest events.

At the subway station as I was waiting for my train home, two women approached me and asked in Spanish for my help with directions. Not only was I flattered that they thought I looked like someone who would know Spanish, but it also gave me a huge kick to use it. It was actually my first opportunity to speak Spanish since coming home from Spain two weeks ago, and I had forgotten what a thrill it gives me. Still don't really understand why, but I am obsessed with speaking Spanish and couldn't be happier that I'll be able to lead some of my tours in Spanish.

So I rode home happily considering all this in my head.

Then I went for my third run in Central Park since Monday, basking in the sun and trees and grass and sharing in the joy of all the other people enjoying it.

P.S. ANNOUNCING MY INTENSE EXCITEMENT THAT MY BABY SISTER IS VISITING ME WITH MY GRANDPARENTS NEXT WEEKEND

Yankee Stadium! When I sent the fam this picture they asked me to name on player on the team and I failed. 

poem in the subway 

hilarious ad in the subway

I live here #wut

Central Park